FBI director offers ‘unusual transparency,’ recommends no charges against Clinton

The FBI is recommending no criminal charges be brought against Hillary Clinton for her use of a personal email server concluding that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday delivered surprise remarks with “unusual transparency” due to the high importance of the case at hand. While the usage of the personal server did not reach the level of criminal misconduct, Comey offered some harshly worded criticism.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey read from prepared remarks. “None of these e-mails should have been on any kind of unclassified system.”

Comey said the bureau “read all of the approximately 30,000 e-mails,” worked to piece back together old and new servers (“a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort”), conducted interviews (including with Clinton) and executed technical examinations as well as interviews to understand the deletion process.

The announcement by Comey comes on a significant day for the Clinton campaign — President Obama is hitting the campaign trail for the first time. Obama is scheduled to appear with Clinton in a joint rally Tuesday afternoon in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“I thought [Comey’s remarks were] really condemning, and you don’t want to be the president entertaining Hillary on Air Force One on the first campaign visit of the whole cycle following that,” Michael Smerconish said on his POTUS show Tuesday.

“So, if there were any collusion whatsoever between the White House and the FBI, the president wouldn’t be traveling today or Comey wouldn’t be making those remarks today.”

Moments after Comey announced his recommendations, presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took to Twitter to offer his opinion.

“If you had John Kasich as the nominee this would be over,” Smerconish added.

“Opinions are irrelevant, and they were all uninformed by insight into our investigation, because we did the investigation the right way,” Comey told reporters. “Only facts matter, and the FBI found them here in an entirely apolitical and professional way.”

The Michael Smerconish Program airs weekdays at 9 am ET on SiriusXM POTUS (Ch. 124)

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